Lovely Witch Hazel - Day 230 - Haiku - For Natural Medicine, How t...

20181206_233343 - Preparing witch hazel to extract.jpg

Lovely witch hazel
Threadlike yellow flowers are
first seen in late fall

Our witch hazel bloomed this year for the first time, so I am very jazzed, though a but disappointed that the blooms don't have the remarkable and bewitching fragrance I'd been led to expect.

I suppose I was expecting something akin to the male papaya tree I had in my front yard in Largo, Florida, which had an exquisite and pungent fragrance, and in bloom it literally perfumed our whole street.

Far from perfuming the neighborhood, witch hazel's lovely flowers are only lightly fragrant, and only when very close. But then, their highly fragranced period may be early in the morning, as every time I smelled them this season it was later in the afternoon, so time will tell.

I am hoping that we will get some viable seeds from it, and that we'll be able to get a few more growing around our place, as I haven't seen any others in our neighborhood, though it is certainly possible that there are more deeper in the woods. They prefer full sun, but they will grow and flower in partial shade, which is how ours was situated when we collected it from a friend's property as a seedling.

20181206_235734 - Preparing witch hazel to extract.jpg

I made a light witch hazel extract from it last year, using the leaves only, but the bush was a lot smaller then and I wasn't keen on cutting it back to use the twigs and bark.

And I certainly didn't want to take root cuttings yet, as I planted the tree as the grave marker for our cat Nutka, so I'm fine with waiting another year or two for root cuttings, and I'll be taking some of the surface roots near the drip line when I do ultimately collect them.

But this year the bush is much larger, easily twice the size or more than it was last year at this time, and much fuller as well. It seems to be quite happy where it is, there were plenty of twigs competing for space that were perfect to be cut, and I was happy that I managed to catch it when there were both fresh and spent flowers; the better for a well-rounded extract.

The leaf extract I made last year was nice, though not terribly strong, and its astringent properties are far less pronounced than is a whole plant extract, though it has its own benefits, being delicate and gentle in its action.

So I've been waiting patiently all year to try my hand again, to make a whole plant extract, and to finally create the highly medicinal full-bodied extract I've been reading and dreaming about.

I've been a fan of witch hazel extract for most of my life, and have used the commercial preparation as my go-to skin toner for much of my adult life, at least before I discovered the wonders of kombucha. But commercial witch hazel, like my leaf extract, is simply not the real deal, as in not the very best and most highly beneficial that a witch hazel extract has to offer.

Over the years I've found and consulted a great many recipes and instructions from various sources. And the recipes are as widely varied as are the herbalists who came up with them.

Some herbalists use only the root bark to make their extracts, while others use entire root pieces chopped finely, and still others use twigs and leaves, either fresh or dried. And while several mention the desirability of finding a plant in full flower from which to take the plant material to extract, as that is when the plant's constituents are at their best for extracting, few mention whether or not they are using the flowers in the material extracted.

As our European ancestors were taught the use of with hazel by the Native Americans who had long perfected its use, and most authors agree that they made a whole plant extract including the roots, twigs, fresh and dried leaves and flowers, this is what I opted to do as well. I didn't collect the root bark, as noted, but I did use a number of twigs, which are difficult to see in the photos, as the lighter leaves covered them.

By the time I made my extract, all of the leaves on the bush were dried, but I had thought to collect fresh leaves some time earlier and refrigerate them, so I was able to use both green and dried leaves in the mix.

20181207_000006 - Preparing witch hazel to extract.jpg

The amount of time to extract seems also to be the source of much disagreement. Some herbalists, apparently unaware that the witch hazel extract is supposed to be a decoction, advise the materials to be brought barely to a simmer for a mere twenty minutes before draining, which wouldn't even begin to fully extract all the valuable and beneficial constituents in the plant material.

Others advise a more reasonable time of three hours, taking care always not to allow the mixture to boil, as many of the more delicate constituents would be altered or destroyed by boiling.

Still others recommend a long, slow extraction period of eight hours or more, allowing the full spectrum of healing properties to be extracted and readied for use, resulting in the highest quality - and most likely the most highly beneficial and medicinal - extract possible.

Having discovered the many benefits of a long, slow extraction process when making hickory syrup, I've opted for the latter, and will extract for a full eight hours, and possibly longer, as my intuition dictates.

I'll embellish this further tomorrow, when I'm a lot more awake, and I'll do a follow-up post in the next day or two once the extraction and final preparation are complete. Much love to you all!

This post, and all those from now until the end of 2018, I am dedicating to the work of #tarc and #yah, aka Hive account@rhondak's nonprofit Appalachian dog rescue, and Hive account@sircork's international charity Hive account@youarehope.